Morality Quotes
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We have collected and put the best morality quotes in the following categories. Enjoy reading these insights and feel free to share this page on your social media to inspire others.
May these morality quotes on many subjects inspire you to never give up and keep working towards your goals. Who knows—success could be just around the corner.
Morality (moralis, lit. ‘manner, character, proper behavior’) is the differentiation of intentions, decisions and actions between those that are distinguished as proper and those that are improper. Morality can be a body of standards or principles derived from a code of conduct from a particular philosophy, religion or culture, or it can derive from a standard that a person believes should be universal. Morality may also be specifically synonymous with “goodness” or “rightness“.
Morality is the differentiation of intentions, decisions, and actions between those that are “good” (or right) and those that are “bad” (or wrong).
See also: Morality, Morals, Evolution of morality, Morality and Religion, Secular Morality, Moral Character, and Akhlaq
Morality
Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless. – Martin Luther King, Jr.
Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered. – Graham Greene
Morality is a burglar’s tool whose merit lies in never being left behind at the scene of the crime. – Karl Kraus
Morality is a private and costly luxury. – Henry Adams
Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis. – Karl Kraus
Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty. – Aldous Huxley
Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness. – Immanuel Kant
Morality is of the highest importance – but for us, not for God. – Albert Einstein
Morality is only moral when it is voluntary. – Lincoln Steffens
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike. – Oscar Wilde
Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married. – George Bernard Shaw
Morality is the attitude we adopt toward people whom we personally dislike. – Oscar Wilde
Morality is the basis of things and truth is the substance of all morality. – Mahatma Gandhi
Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose. – Friedrich Nietzsche
Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual. – Friedrich Nietzsche
Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that % of them are wrong. – H. L. Mencken
Morality is the thing upon which your friends smile, and immorality is the thing upon which they frown. – Elbert Hubbard
Morality is truth in full bloom. – Victor Hugo
Morality knows nothing of geographical boundaries, or distinctions of race. – Herbert Spencer
Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning — an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies. – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace. – Oscar Wilde
Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad. – Denis Diderot
Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions. – Will Durant
Moral courage is higher and a rarer virtue than physical courage. – William Slim
Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts. – Aristotle
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo. – H. G. Wells
Moral power is probably best when it is not used. The less you use it the more you have. – Andrew Young
A man that has lost moral sense is like a man in battle with both of his legs shot off: he has nothing to stand on. – Henry Ward Beecher
A set of rules laid out by professionals to show the way they would like to act if it was profitable. – Frank Dane
A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true. – Socrates
Abortion is advocated only by persons who have themselves been born. – Ronald Reagan
Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other. – Mark Twain
An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable. – George Bernard Shaw
Children lack morality, but they also lack fake morality. – Mignon McLaughlin
Children often have a much stronger concept of morality than adults. – Nina Bawden
Corruption is like a ball of snow, once it’s set a rolling it must increase. – Charles Caleb Colton
Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. So aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something. – Henry David Thoreau
Do not depend upon the morality of a person until you have seen him behave while in anger. – Umar
Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons. – Thomas Hardy
Don’t be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. – Henry David Thoreau
Don’t let us make imaginary evils, when you know we have so many real ones to encounter. – Oliver Goldsmith
Even if everyone else is not doing good. I alone will. Even if everyone else is doing wrong, I alone will not. – unknown
Every man has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum. – Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality. – William Hazlitt
Every young man would do well to remember that all successful business stands on the foundation of morality. – Henry Ward Beecher
For morality life is a war, and the service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for volunteers. – William James
For the superior morality, of which we hear so much, we too would desire to be thankful: at the same time, it were but blindness to deny that this superior morality is properly rather an inferior criminality, produced not by greater love of Virtue, but by greater perfection of Police; and of that far subtler and stronger Police, called Public Opinion. – Thomas Carlyle
Gods and politics are the tools with which the godless and unprincipled manipulate the gullible. – Janet Morris
He that has not religion to govern his morality, is not a dram better than my mastiff-dog; so long as you stroke him, and please him, and do not pinch him, he will play with you as finely as may be, he is a very good moral mastiff; but if you hurt him, he will fly in your face, and tear out your throat. – John Selden
However great an evil immorality may be, we must not forget that it is not without its beneficial consequences. It is only through extremes that men can arrive at the middle path of wisdom and virtue. – Wilhelm von Humboldt
I have never regarded politics as the arena of morals. It is the arena of interest. – Aneurin Bevan
I never come back home with the same moral character I went out with; something or other becomes unsettled where I had achieved internal peace; some one or other of the things I had put to flight reappears on the scene. – Seneca the Younger
I’m as pure as the driven slush. – Tallulah Bankhead
If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say give them up, for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people. – Robert Louis Stevenson
In every age he had ever studied, doomsayers abounded. No millennium is attractive to the man immured in it; enough prophecies have been made in antiquity that one who desires, in any age, to take the position that apocalypse is at hand can easily defend it. He would not join that dour order; he would not worry about anything but Tempus, and the matter awaiting his attention. – Janet Morris
In the ocean of baseness, the deeper we get, the easier the sinking. – James Russell Lowell
It is almost systematically to constitute a natural moral law. Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no difference between right and wrong. – Anatole France
It is far easier for a woman to lead a blameless life than it is for a man; all she has to do is to avoid sexual intercourse like the plague. – Angela Carter
It is safe to say that no other superstition is so detrimental to growth, so enervating and paralyzing to the minds and hearts of the people, as the superstition of Morality. – Emma Goldman
It is with flowers, as with moral qualities: the bright-coloured are sometimes poisonous; but, I believe, never the sweet-smelling. – Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare
It’s easy enough to preach morality on a full belly. – Erwin Sylvanus
Let the public mind become corrupt, and all efforts to secure property, liberty, or life by the force of laws written on paper will be as vain as putting up a sign in an apple orchard to exclude canker worms. – Horace Mann
Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle. – George Washington
Life was never simple, happiness never where you thought you’d left it, and right and wrong no more fixed than clouds in the sky. – Janet Morris
Many people convince themselves if it is economically necessary, it’s morally right. That’s not always the case. – Anonymous
Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine. – Sigmund Freud
Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales. – Aleister Crowley
Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what’s right. – Isaac Asimov
No author can be as moral as his work and no preacher as pious as his sermons. – Jean Paul
Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people. – Aleister Crowley
Our morality seems to be only a check on the ultimate domination of force, just as our politeness is a check on the impulse of every pig to put his feet in the trough. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice. – Henry David Thoreau
The best way to teach morality is to make it a habit with children. – Aristotle
The better one is morally the less aware they are of their virtue. – James Anthony Froude
The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught. – H. L. Mencken
The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil. – Georges Bataille
The fatal trait of the times is the divorce between religion and morality. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
The foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying. – Thomas Huxley
The great rule of moral conduct is next to God, respect time. – Johann Kaspar Lavater
The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error. – Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
The higher the building the lower the morals. – Noël Coward
The higher the buildings, the lower the morals.The higher the buildings, the lower the morals. – Albert Einstein
The immorality of men triumphs over the amorality of women. – Karl Kraus
The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom. – Michel de Montaigne
The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit. – Aristotle
The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is. – George Bernard Shaw
The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life. – Albert Einstein
The only immorality is not to do what one has to do when one has to do it. – Jean Anouilh
The person is always happy who is in the presence of something they cannot know in full. A person as advanced far in the study of morals who has mastered the difference between pride and vanity. – Nicolas Chamfort
The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live. – Ayn Rand
The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved. – Aldous Huxley
The Seven Deadly Sins are a litany of victimless crimes, compiled to distract attention from the bloody felonies of the righteous. – Robert Brault
The test of morality of a society is what it does with it’s children. – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The world of empirical morality consists for the most part of nothing but ill will and envy. – Goethe
There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right. – Ronald Reagan
There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it. – Denis Diderot
There is no such thing as morality or immorality in thought. There is immoral emotion. – Oscar Wilde
There is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral. – Walter Lippmann
There’s always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street. – D. H. Lawrence
Though sages may pour out their wisdom’s treasure, there is no sterner moralist than pleasure. – George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron Byron
Time is the great equalizer in the field of morals. – H. L. Mencken
To give a man full knowledge of morality, I would send him to no other book than the New Testament. – John Locke
To set up as a standard of public morality a notion which can neither be defined nor conceived is to open the door to every kind of tyranny. – Simone Weil
Unfortunately, moral beauty in art — like physical beauty in a person — is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness. – Susan Sontag
Unless we discover actual truth, morality is up for grabs. – Pamela Christian
We become moral when we are unhappy. – Marcel Proust
We have in fact, two kinds of morality, side by side: one that we preach, but do not practice, and another that we practice, but seldom preach. – Bertrand Russell
We have two kinds of morality side by side: one which we preach but do not practice and another which we practice but seldom preach. – Bertrand Russell
We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality. – Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
We moralize among ruins. – Benjamin Disraeli
What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after. – Ernest Hemingway
What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike. – Alfred North Whitehead
What we call “morals” is simply blind obedience to words of command. – Havelock Ellis
When virtue is lost, benevolence appears, when benevolence is lost right conduct appears, when right conduct is lost, expedience appears. Expediency is the mere shadow of right and truth; it is the beginning of disorder. – Laozi
When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. – Joan Didion
Whenever you are to do a thing, though it can never be known but to yourself, ask yourself how you would act were all the world looking at you, and act accordingly. – Thomas Jefferson
Why should moral distinction be made between death by the spirochete and death by the streptococcus? – Martin H. Fischer
Without doubt half the ethical rules they din into our ears are designed to keep us at work. – Llewelyn Powys
Wrong is wrong even if everyone is doing it. Right is right even if no one is doing it. – unknown
Morality comes from God